Lesson 2: Hello world
Now we have a better idea of what Eleventy is and have the tools we need to get started, let’s make something that we can see in the browser.
Remember dotfiles from the last lesson? Well now we’re going to add the most important dotfile of this entire project: .eleventy.js.
Create a new file in your eleventy-from-scratch folder called .eleventy.js and add the following to it:
module.exports = (config) => {
return {
dir: {
input: 'src',
output: 'dist',
},
};
};
This is our Eleventy config file. It's the beating heart of your Eleventy site. It delegates and instructs everything that makes up the final output.
What we've just added is the core, most basic config. We've exported a function which returns some settings. These settings tell Eleventy to look in the src folder for all of our content, templates and other source code, and tell it to use dist as the output folder.
Remember: the output will be folders and HTML pages (at the moment).
Adding some dependencies
We’ve chatted a lot about Eleventy so far, but still haven’t even installed it!
First, though, we need to get ourselves a package.json file. This contains metadata about the project and lets npm identify the project and handle its dependencies.
Because you already have Node.js installed, setting up your package.json file is really straightforward.
Make sure you're in your
eleventy-from-scratch folder and run the following in your terminal:
npm init -y
You should see an output that looks like this:
{
"name": "eleventy-from-scratch",
"version": "1.0.0",
"description": "",
"main": ".eleventy.js",
"scripts": {
"test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
},
"keywords": [],
"author": "",
"license": "ISC"
}
What's happened here is that npm has generated a package.json file for us, and by using the -y flag, we told it to answer yes to all of the questions it would normally ask.
Now that’s sorted, we can install Eleventy. In the terminal, run the following command:
npm install @11ty/eleventy
We’ve installed a local version of Eleventy in our project. Let’s make it do something!
The eagle-eyed amongst you might have noticed that we didn’t install Eleventy globally. This is indeed what the quick start suggests on the Eleventy site, but running packages locally, via npx is something I prefer to do, as a symptom of other, more complex projects in the past.
When you work in a team, running packages that are local to the project means that everyone is running off the same setup.
In the context of this course, it doesn’t really matter which way you choose to do it. Just bear in mind that the commands throughout the rest of this course will be related to using a local version of Eleventy.
Hello, world
In your eleventy-from-scratch/src folder, add a new file called index.md and add the following to it:
Hello, world
Yes, that’s pretty uneventful, but let’s now put Eleventy to work. Make sure you've saved your changes in your text editor. Then, in your terminal, in the eleventy-from-scratch folder, run the following command:
npx eleventy --serve
If you go to http://localhost:8080 (the default port for Eleventy) in your browser, it should look like this:
Pretty cool, right?
By running npx we use the local Eleventy dependency. You can also use npx to run other packages, like Eleventy, locally.
The --serve flag in our terminal command instructs Eleventy to serve the dist folder with a local web server and also watch for any file changes. This means that if you change the content of index.md and refresh your browser: you should see the new content.
Setting up our scripts
Running npx eleventy --serve in the terminal is easy enough, but it would be even easier to just run npm start instead. To do this, we use npm scripts.
Open up eleventy-from-scratch/package.json and find the "scripts" element. Find the line that says "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1" and replace it with the following:
"start": "npx eleventy --serve"
The start script is a special one. It’s a default script that npm will run if you just run npm start in the terminal. There are a few others, such as restart, stop and test. You can read more about them in the npm docs.
Any non-standard scripts you add to your package.json file can be run with npm run followed by the script name. For example, if you had a script called build, you could run it with npm run build.
Your package.json file should now look like this:
{
"name": "eleventy-from-scratch",
"version": "1.0.0",
"description": "",
"main": ".eleventy.js",
"scripts": {
"start": "npx eleventy --serve"
},
"keywords": [],
"author": "",
"license": "ISC",
"dependencies": {
"@11ty/eleventy": "^2.0.1"
}
}
Open your terminal again. Press Ctrl + C at the same time to stop it, then run npm start. It should fire up that same “Hello, world” page at http://localhost:8080.
Wrapping up
We’ve achieved a lot in this lesson. We’ve installed Eleventy and got it up and running in an npm script. We’ve also added our first piece of content to the site which will become our home page.
Next up: we’re going to start digging into HTML and Nunjucks, which will suddenly start to make things really interesting.